"Elect Women for a Change": The Lies of a Woman-Hating System
August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a member of a Revolution Club who is on the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride
People across the country have been waking up to the extreme and hateful torrent of legislation and assaults on women and their rights. Time and time again, these concerns have been diverted into the tired trope that the solution to all this is to elect more women into office. Politicians, lobbyists, and reputable membership organizations such as NOW—the National Organization for Women—point to the unevenness in gender representation in the halls of power, and promote slogans like "Elect Women for a Change." This is a powerful misdirection, deadly in its deception, and paralyzing in its effects.
It is true that there are very few women in office—and it is also true that there is a vicious war on women. But while there is a correlation between these two things, it is not a relationship of cause and effect. It is definitely NOT true that electing more women up through the ranks of this system, organized as it is, will bring the change that is needed, or even serve to end the attacks on abortion rights.
This is a system that is organized in such a way that the material things that people need to survive (food, shelter, clothes) are produced by the majority of people, while the means to produce them, as well as the products that are produced, are owned and profited on by the very few. That very small group of people exploit the rest and, wielding the power of production and ownership, rest inside a whole framework of political processes, the enforcement of laws, and the use of prisons, police, and military force to protect that same dynamic and maintain their positions of power.
For as long as society has been divided into classes in this way and the material needs of (now billions) of people can only be met by working for and being exploited by the very small class of people who dominate the rest, patriarchy—that is, the systemic domination of women by men—has been essential. Since that time, the control of women and their ability to reproduce has been key in maintaining the continuity of this whole system of exploitation of the many by the few from one generation to the next.
Let us not forget that for many thousands of years, the idea of women as full participants in society was unthinkable. It did not occur to anyone for a very, very long time that women should rise above the position of slaves that breed more slaves for the ruling class, and ornaments that breed more kings to rule over them. The very aspirations of women themselves have only been raised by relatively recent changes in society at large. What is still to this day demanded of women is to conform to the roles of either sex object or breeder—or both at the same time. There is not a single political platform in the confines of official bourgeois politics that can directly challenge or fight to end this dynamic, because the end of the oppression of women requires an end to the continuity of the domination of one small group over the majority of humanity.
Neither women nor men who first and foremost represent this ruling class can represent the best interests of women everywhere. If the individual identity of any person meant that they have the best interest of that whole group in mind, there could be no Black president of the U.S. who bombs African countries and sits atop a system that is carrying out a slow genocide through mass incarceration of Black people and other oppressed peoples right here in the U.S. There could be no Sarah Palin, and no Michelle Bachmann, whose whole political platform rests on a Christian fascist program that includes, as one core element, the enslavement of women to forced motherhood. There could be no female CEOs of first-world corporations that capitalize off of the exploitation and commodification of female sweatshop workers in Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the list goes on. And, despite the widespread self-delusion of so many, there could be no Hillary Clinton who actually has carried out war crimes on an international scale with horrific reverberations for humanity as a whole and for the half of humanity that is female in particular. It was in fact the Clinton regime and Hillary herself that popularized the atrocious notion that abortion should be "Safe, Legal, and Rare," and that abortion is a "tragic choice," undercutting the essential, positive, and liberating nature of abortion rights for a whole generation of Americans.
More fundamentally, this system cannot and will not ever lead to the full liberation of women, regardless of the gender of the people in the seats of power. The question is not who sits in the seat, but what is the very foundation of those seats? Is this a system that allows for humanity to flourish? Is this even a system that allows, as it claims to, for all the decisions that either reinforce or challenge oppressive divisions (between "first" and "third" worlds, between white and Black people in this country, between the need to preserve the planet and the relentless drive for profit) to be left to the majority of people to decide? Of course not. This system relies on oppression, exploitation, and dehumanization to maintain its cohesion. This is a society that says, despite all the scientific advancements and understanding of the age, women should be forced to be mothers just because they happen to be pregnant!
The source of this whole war on women is definitively NOT the fact that there are so few women in political power; it is the deeply patriarchal and oppressive domination of women throughout society and the extremely vicious and aggressive and acute drive to intensify this enslavement of women that is the problem. Furthermore, the continuous attempts to divert people's genuine and righteous outrage over this current war on women into a preoccupation with getting more women into office, rooted in the lies that (1) the identity of who is in office is going to determine their positions and (2) as if anyone of any identity can fundamentally act in a way to bring about liberation of women within a system that is class-divided and structurally patriarchal, is to lead people AWAY from the real problem and the real solution. The real problem is that women cannot be free under this system and that there is a particularly acute drive right now to more viciously enslave women. The real solution is for all the way communist revolution to dig all this up and bring into being a whole new world. The real solution is a total overthrow of the illegitimate ruling class and the rise of a revolutionary state power, serving the interests of the masses of people to reorganize production, to promote a scientific understanding of reality, and to work relentlessly to eradicate all the twisted social relations and ideologies that have for far too long ruined the lives, poisoned the minds, and cut short the dreams of people around the world. This is the only real solution, and we can begin to realize it right now; right now, millions can and must unite and rise to the challenge of confronting this war on women and wage mass, broad, uncompromising resistance against all forms of female enslavement.
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